Al Calloway Says: Has Planned Parenthood been good for us?

I don't know of anyone who would get into a losing argument with black women about the virtue of birth control, and, by extension in many cases, birth-control clinics.

While skepticism of provider motive has been high – given a history of medical experimentation on black people by white scientists and physicians through the aegis of various local, state and federal governments – distrust is based on the fear of exploitation.

White people, however, push forward with facile salesmanship in luring blacks to that which glitters.

Take Planned Parenthood for example, the twelfth-largest charitable organization in America today. Margaret Sanger, a New York socialist and atheist, became a birth-control pioneer and feminist. Sanger developed the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in the 1920s, a precursor of Planned Parenthood.

Sanger was something else, too. She was America's leading exponent of white nationalism through eugenics. The Oxford American Dictionary defines eugenics as "the study of improving the human species by improvement of inherited qualities."

Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, is said to be responsible for adding eugenics to the English lexicon. The word derives from the Greek eugenes, which means "well born."

It is vitally important to emphasize here that Margaret Sanger was no "right-winger," but over on the left of liberal, a socialist! During the first half of the 20th century, and particularly from the Great Depression to the civil rights movement of the 1950s, socialist ideology enjoyed prominence among America’s black leadership.

Sanger started off decrying the inferiority of eastern Europeans through eugenics, but in 1929, the year of the great economic and social crash, she began focusing in on blacks in Harlem. At the time, most of New York's 330,000 black residents lived in Harlem, so Sanger started researching black birth patterns there. In June of 1932, Sanger published an edition of her Birth Control Review journal under the title "The Negro Number," and she got NAACP co-founder W. E. B. DuBois and other black leaders to write articles.

Here's what Sanger often quoted from DuBois' article: "The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly."

A slew of black writers wrote agreements with Fisk University's first black president, Charles S. Johnson, who wrote in Sanger's journal that "eugenic discrimination" was vital for black people. By 1939, Sanger's organization had become the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA), and she developed the Negro Project, which were so-called "family planning centers" established in black areas. The goal of such centers was to reduce black populations through eugenics.

DuBois schooled Sanger on how to approach black churches and newspapers. She would later garner the support of the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and other great leaders, and still later even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sanger also provided much-needed public relations in the development of the birth-control pill. Out of the Negro Project came government-sponsored Planned Parenthood clinics in or near neighborhoods where poor and near-poor black women could get the pill for free or cheaply. Clinics also provided condoms and diaphragms, and fitted many black women with intrauterine devices, also known as IUDs.

Finally sensible leadership came to the fore as the late Florida NAACP field director, Marvin Davies, argued that black people need to produce more babies until blacks become 30 to 35 percent of America’s population. Forcible and involuntary sterilizations via federally funded neighborhood clinics and school clinics were at last seen as attempts to slow or erase the future of black America. Eugenics is the politics of containment incarnate!

The reality of race genocide took hold among young black intellectuals and activists of the 1960s. By 1962, the National Urban League reported that the organization would no longer support so-called contraception, and many local NAACP branches followed Davies’ lead.

The black genocide issue was dealt with at the 1967 Black Power Conference in Newark, New Jersey. A resolution passed that denounced birth control as an insidious form of black containment−of genocide.

Today, are black leaders and activists watching, researching?

Are young black girls being sterilized and experimented with in school and neighborhood clinics?

Are parents and guardians monitoring the schools?

Has black genocide actually escalated with the proliferation of drugs and HIV/AIDS in black neighborhoods, an overwhelming increase in the incarceration of black males, and school mis-education?